This is very applicable in the world of financial advice and many clients are not aware of it.

Unfortunately, when you don’t know any different you are often also oblivious to the consequences, which include:

• Missed opportunity
• Higher stress from strategies and products that don’t ideally suit your personality and needs
• Higher costs and lower value-for-money
• Missed lifestyle goals

Example Hammers in The World of Financial Advice

A tax accountant thinks a Self Managed Super Fund is the answer to getting control over your superannuation.

Why? Because they’re not licensed to recommend other off-the-shelf products. (Which, by the way give you great control without the legal responsibility of a SMSF.) And because they’re not licensed to give such advice they naturally wouldn’t spend any professional development time researching alternate options.

A stockbroker thinks owning direct shares is the best way to create wealth.

While a real estate agent or property developer thinks residential investment property is the best way.

And your mates and colleagues think the best way is the way they are doing it!

Why? Because it’s probably the only way they know. (Plus you doing what they suggest sub-consciously validates their decisions. It’s a psychological phenomenon of herding or “group think.)

(Apologies to readers in the above professions who cleverly operate outside the above generalisation. Keep it up!)

Ask Yourself

Since so many types of professions can call themselves “financial advisers” ask yourself which tool is the focus of their tool box?

You Need A Team with a Tool Box

The truth is that there is no one best way and no single tool that will be all you need through your life.

Almost everything in life requires money to facilitate it. So your financial planning and management needs to be as deep and broad as your life.

That’s a life long job that requires a diverse tool box.

Rather than doing and knowing it all yourself you outsource some of that planning and management to the financial professions.

Your best solution is to build a team of experts.

Your Team

Your primary contact when managing your finances should be a comprehensive financial planner.

True financial planners have a tool box full of various tools. They assess the problem/goal and then select the right combination of tools.

Taking the metaphor deeper, true financial planners may not actually swing all the tools themselves. After identifying the right tools they may recommend specialists for certain tools that you need.

This is illustrated in the image below:

Who to call

So when you have a financial problem or a decision you are mulling over don’t just speak to your accountant or investment adviser. They may not have the right tool for the job.

Instead speak to your financial planner who has a comprehensive, contextual view of both your situation and the world of financial strategies.

And if you don’t yet have a big picture person in your team then call me today.

What do you think?

Share your thoughts about this perspective in the comments below. I’d love to know:

• How do you currently solve the bigger picture aspect of your financial decisions?
• Who do you turn to for help?
• Who are valuable categories of advice professionals in your team?

And what financial decisions are occupying your mind right now? Complete the survey here

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Retirement simulator launched by AMP
2. Defining TRUE financial planning
3. How to reduce your tax

However, I know from talking to people after my seminars that when they are struggling to save money they also mentally struggle to pay for support in creating better behaviours.

What we professionals and our clients have know for decades has today been confirmed by research – clients of financial planners save and invest more for their future lifestyle.

On average clients “save an additional $2,457 each year, compared to a similar individual who does not have a financial planner.”

Source: KPMG Econtech research for IFSA (Investment and Financial Services Association).

Personally, I charge less than that amount for my Cash Flow Coaching program, which is just like having a personal trainer for your saving. Clients typically get control of where their money goes, accelerate their debt repayment and start saving for important lifestyle goals.

When you consider how much interest you save on your credit card and other debts then cash flow coaching delivers a very immediate return on investment by boosting your savings.

So if you are a little financially unfit enlist in a boot camp for your saving. Call or e-mail me now to join my cash flow coaching program.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. How to easily save 5% on your groceries
2. What is the value of financial advice?
3. An example of how DIY is costly

That conclusion is wrong. Believing it will cause you unnecessary stress and probably lose you money.

The reality is that this product focus is stressing about the detail and missing the big picture.

For example, product focus is like stressing about finding the best pair of mountain climbing shoes.

• What if you’re never quite sure you’ve got the best shoes so you never set off on your trek up the mountain? (Behaviour and delay)
• What if you set off but you’re on the wrong mountain? You get to the top and you look across and realise you actually wanted to summit a different mountain? (Life goal clarity)

The greatest cost in wealth creation is behavioural. The long term lifestyle cost of a slightly more expensive product to get you from A to B is minimal when compared to the cost of delay.

Don’t allow worry about product-aligned financial advice to cause you to procrastinate from taking positive action with your finances. The procrastination will be far costlier to your short and long term lifestyle.

Further the product has nowhere near the impact of getting the right strategy and being clear on your goals. And since goals clarification and strategy selection are the steps before product selection all good financial planners will advise you on that irrespective of them being tied to product provider. That is the true value of planinng your finances.

Stop worrying about finding the best investment product and just take positive action today towards your personal clearly defined goals.

If you need greater clarity of your goals and you need support to consistently take action then hire a financial planner to guide and suport you. They’re like a personal trainer for you and your money.

P.S. Just in case you’ve assumed I am tied to a product provider – I’m not. I deliberately choose my licensee to ensure I can recommend an extremely broad range of products across many providers. I am aligned to your best outcome not to a product. (Just ask my clients.)

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Fee based advice hard to find
2. Beware of fake financial advice websites
3. Beware of industry super fund advice

The Newspoll found that two thirds of Australians are stressed about money, second only to being stressed about work. Does that include you?

The Lifeline poll reminded me of research published last year by Relationships Australia, which found that financial stress was the second largest contributor to relationship breakdown, affecting 35 percent of relationships.

This may be a stretch, but if we can work together to reduce our financial stress we may be able to lower the divorce rate and bring more joy into everyone’s lives.

Causes of financial stress

I started writing a list of what has caused financial stress among people I’ve met. Most of the causes fell into two broad categories:

1. Not enough money (to do, buy or retain)
2. Doing it for the money

In this article I’ll share some tips for reducing your stress caused by “not enough money”. Later, I’ll write about “doing it for the money”, but if you’re keen to learn how to earn money doing what you love then please call me now.

Stress about not enough money

Our stress seems to rise when we don’t have enough money for something that is really important to us. For example:

• To join our close friends on a big interstate or overseas holiday (maybe to celebrate a milestone birthday)
• To buy a bigger house when our family has well and truly outgrown the current shoebox
• To keep our car and house when we lose our job and fall behind in the mortgage repayments

Our stress doesn’t appear to rise when we decide we can’t afford the $2 chocolate bar or $15 movie ticket. I believe that is because those things aren’t really that important to most of us.

Financially related decisions can also stress us, and I believe they fall into this broad category. Our stress level is affected by the materiality of the loss or by the consequence of a wrong decision. If we get the decision wrong it may mean we won’t be able to upgrade our shoebox house when we want to, so then we stress about the decision.

Save for the Significant. Minimise the Insignificant

To reduce your financial stress plan to have enough money for those things that are most important to you. This is a personal thing and is based on your values.

Once you have plans to be able to afford the most important things in your life you can spend the rest of your money on whatever you want, guilt free.

You need to move your thinking from “next pay” to “next year” and then onto “next decade”.

I believe it is through spending too much on daily insignificant things that we end up not having enough for the significant things. This is often because the significant experiences and achievements are lumpy and irregular, so they can sneak up on us.

Bring far away important things into focus

Here’s an exercise that you can do.

Get a blank piece of paper and place it in landscape orientation. Across the middle from left to right draw a thick line. The left represents now; the right represents your passing, say at age 100.

Divide this line representing the remainder of your life into bite size chunks. The length of each chunk is not fixed, just make it meaningful to you. You may like symmetry and therefore make each chunk an even five years. Or each chunk could be of different length representing different life stages you have in mind.

Next fill the rest of the page with all of those achievements and experiences that are really important for you in each of those meaningful chunks of life. For example:

• Career transitions you’d like to make
• Places you’d like to see in the world
• Experiences you’d like to have with your family
• Time out of the workforce to study, reflect or travel
• Contributions you’d like to make to your community and world

For inspiration on what is really important reflect on your personal values.

Now implement plans

Implement a clear plan to manage your money so that you achieve and experience what is really important to you. Then you can happily spend the remainder on whatever insignificant pleasures you want, guilt free.

This is how you can achieve what I call financial fulfilment. And this exercise is part of the process that I call Fulfilment Financial Planning. To learn more call me on 1300 669 101. I take clients from all around Australia and would love to hear from you.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. The source of financial stress
2. The Three Fatal Financial Behaviours
3. The dilemma of realistic financial goals

When seeking financial planning advice, especially for the first time I recommend that you start by speaeking with CFPs. You can find them on the Financial Planning Association website.

To raise awareness of Certified Financial Planners the Financial Planning Association has released a 60 second video, which you can watch below (or here on YouTube.)

Please leave a comment below to let me know if you think it is effective. Would you now want to see a CFP in preference to any other financial adviser?

I genuinely want to read your comments as I often send my two cents worth to the FPA. You can leave an anonymous comment if you like. Thanks.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Latest Research: You Save More by Paying For Financial Advice
2. Trust pros for financial advice over friends and family, survey suggests
3. What is fee for service financial advice?

Why did I write “of any sort” above? Well, because there are no restrictions on who can call themselves a financial adviser.

And the sheer breadth of what could come under the banner of “financial advice” creates a lot of confusion. The sad consequence of the confusion is that in my experience most people have a very incomplete picture, which leads them to avoid seeking financial planning advice.

True Financial Planning

I wish I could tell you that there was a definition of financial planning that the entire industry, regulators and government agreed upon. Sadly that level of consensus is something I can only dream about in my lifetime.

So I am going to share with you my vision of true financial planning that I strive towards when working 1-on-1 with people.

My definition

To me true financial planning is about maximising the likelihood that you have the financial resources to always live the life you’d love, now and in the future.

In shorthand I think of this as financial fulfilment.

It’s much more than just investment advice

Every day you make many decisions that involve or impact upon your money, that impact upon your financial resources.

The lifestyle you lead is the cumulative impact of the daily decisions you make in managing your money (and other things). The breadth of the possible lifestyle outcomes over time is illustrated below.

Some of those possible outcomes may fall within your vision of “living the life you’d love, and loving the life you’re living”. Many outcomes probably don’t.

Remove all the preconceptions from what you’ve heard or experienced and zoom up to a bigger picture. Financial planning is simply managing your money with purpose.

The purpose being to achieve the life outcome where you have the money to be, do and have what is really important to you.

Viewed at that higher level managing your money with purpose and achieving your desired outcome is something you could do yourself. (If you spent the time to acquire the knowledge and expertise.)

A qualified financial planner’s role is to help you achieve your desired life outcome quicker, easier and more enjoyably than if you do it yourself.

True financial planning in practice

In practice true financial planning is a dynamic, ongoing process just like your life is. The key conceptual elements are illustrated below.

It seems obvious to start with your goals. My experience has been that many people can’t clearly articulate these, and have difficulty prioritising them. In that case you go back (or deeper) one step to uncover your values, to understand what is really important to you.

Your life experience influences your values and they shape your tangible goals. Your goals filter in the appropriate strategies, which in turn illuminate the every day tactical actions you need to take to get the lifestyle outcome you want.

That is why there is no cookie cutter, no one size fits all. And it is also why you should not automatically do what your mates or colleagues are doing. They’re not you – you are unique.

The value of true financial planning advice

When you consider that true financial planning is about maximising the likelihood you will be able to always live the life you’d love the value is immeasurably large. And the biggest benefits are the intangible peace of mind and comfort.

Conversely, the cost of not doing it can be immeasurably large on the downside. (Know anyone who is a miserable soul because they “can’t afford…”?)

You can read more detail about the value of financial advice here.

How to have the money for what’s important to you

If you’re not living the life you’d love and part of the reason has to do with money then a true financial planner can help. Similarly if you are not confident that you’ll have the money in the future to live your desired life.

And if you’re not clear on what you want or what is most important to you then a really good financial planner can coach you through uncovering those things. That will be the first part of their process of working with you.

If you like the sound of true financial planning that I described above then call me because that is what I do.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. If your only tool is a hammer
2. What a CFP represents
3. Australia’s Top 50 Financial Advisers

In this interview on Wake Up WA, I answer these questions with a unique model I have developed. Watch the video now.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Profit sharing with your adviser
2. If your only tool is a hammer
3. Find the right property mentor

The research by Investment Trends found that just 11 percent of Australian financial advisers now derived a majority of their revenue from pure fee-for-service models. (Read more here.) Some good news is that this number is increasing.

One very interesting result from the report is that: “those planners with over half their revenue derived from pure fee-for-service were likely to spend more time discussing planning for financial and lifestyle goals…”

To me financial advice and wise money management is not actually about the money – it’s about the lifestyle that you want money to facilitate.

So if the first questions you want your adviser to ask are about you and your lifestyle goals, and not about how much money you have to invest, then this research suggests you should seek a financial adviser who charges fees. That way you are more likely to find one who will ask you about your goals.

Don’t know where to start? Then start by finding advisers whose licensee is not owned by a product provider. That will eliminate about 80 percent of the market.

(This is not to say there aren’t exceptions to the general guide, but if you want a clear path through the maze then this is your quick start approach.)

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Why performance based fees for advice won’t work
2. What is fee for service financial advice?
3. What is the value of financial advice?

By now your sub-conscious may have triggered that I may be writing about this because I am on the list – and you are right.

For the third year I have been acknowledged as one of Australia’s Top 50 Financial Advisers. Read more about the AFR Smart Investor Masterclass 2008 here.

You may also enjoy these related articles:

1. Beware of industry super fund advice
2. Fee based advice hard to find
3. Why performance based fees for advice won’t work

Discover your financial fitness by completing our brand new Financial Fitness quiz now. (It’s free and takes about 70 seconds).

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